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Overview

Fanny Hill, also known as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, has been a notorious novel since it first appeared in London in 1748-9. Banned for its "obscene" content, this fictional account of a young woman's unconventional route to middle-class respectability is, in fact, a lively and engaging comic romp through the boudoirs and brothels of Augustan England, with a heroine whose adventures and setbacks never lessen her humanity or her determination to find real love and happiness. Fanny's story offers modern readers sensuality and substance, as well as an unusually frank depiction of love and sex in the eighteenth century.

Product Details

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more
widely known as Fanny Hill, has been a notorious novel since it
first appeared in London in 1748-9. Banned for its
“obscene” content, this fictional account of a young
woman’s unconventional route to middle-class respectability is,
in fact, a lively and engaging comic romp through the boudoirs and
brothels of Augustan England, with a heroine whose adventures and
setbacks never lessen her humanity or her determination to find real
love and happiness. Occupying a space somewhere between
straightforward pornography and the mainstream domestic fiction of its
day, Fanny’s story offers modern readers both sensuality and
substance, as well as an unusually frank depiction of love and sex in
the eighteenth century.

Although John Cleland produced numerous pamphlets, plays, and other
works in his career as a London hack writer, he is only known today
for his authorship of Fanny Hill. Born in Surrey in 1710,
Cleland was the eldest child of a transplanted Scotsman, William
Cleland, and his wife, Lucy. John Cleland turned to writing for a
living after a twelve-year tenure with the East India Company in
Bombay, but his finances were bad enough to land him in Fleet Prison
for debt in 1748. Spurred by an urgent need of funds and aided by the
abundance of free time offered by his situation, Cleland finished and
revised the original manuscript of the Fanny Hill, which he had
begun work on some years earlier. The subsequent obscenity lawsuits
landed Cleland in serious legal trouble, but the novel’s
notoriety generated demand from curious readers, and Cleland
eventually authored a heavily revised, expurgated edition of the book
in an effort to produce additional income while avoiding further legal
actions. Although Cleland continued to write for many more years, he
never enjoyed any greater success; when he died in Westminster in
1789, the event attracted little public notice.

The obscenity charges brought against Cleland, his publishers, and his
printer in 1749 launched Fanny Hill into instant notoriety.
Although all of the defendants were found guilty, and the novel was
officially banned from publication, the verdict did not prevent the
book from being quietly printed and sold throughout the remainder of
the century. It continued to circulate surreptitiously for the next
two hundred years, even though Victorian prudery attempted to sink the
novel into general obscurity, and early twentieth-century critics
typically ignored or condemned Cleland’s work, as well.
Ironically, it was another obscenity suit that finally brought
Fanny Hill back into the limelight. In 1963, Fanny Hill
again became the subject of legal scrutiny when G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, a well-known American publishing company, attempted to release a
new edition of Fanny Hill in the United States. The case,
brought by the City of New York, was ultimately dismissed by the New
York State Supreme Court, and in 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court also
cleared the novel for legal publication in the United States. Not
surprisingly, the publicity and controversy surrounding Fanny
Hill and its publication produced a boom in critical and popular
interest; both serious academic studies and pornographic film
adaptations appeared in abundance for the next several years. One of
the most important scholarly productions of this period was William H.
Epstein’s 1974 biography, John Cleland: Images of a Life,
which continues to be the most thorough and extensive study of the
author and his work. Although widespread popular interest faded over
time, Fanny Hill has enjoyed more lasting attention from
scholars in the field of eighteenth-century studies because it
addresses so many of the period’s central issues and concerns,
particularly those relating to the developing roles and functions of
the novel, the construction of women’s social and sexual
identities, and the period’s attitudes toward sex and personal
pleasure.

The literary importance of Fanny Hill can only be fully
appreciated if we know something about its cultural and historical
context. It appeared almost simultaneously with many of the
century’s greatest novels, and it shares several key
characteristics with them. Samuel Richardson’s enormously
successful Pamela was published in 1740, while
Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa, appeared in 1748,
and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was published in 1749. All
three of these novels would come to be seen as tremendously important,
influential texts; the course of English fiction would be molded by
their influence on later writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Richardson’s two novels feature sympathetic heroines
struggling against social and sexual antagonism; in Pamela,
this struggle ends in a Cinderella marriage between the heroine and
her former antagonist, while in Clarissa a violent rape leads
to the deaths of both the title heroine and her ravisher.
Fielding’s comic masterpiece follows the escapades of a roguish
young hero whose love for his sweetheart does not prevent him from
indulging in a series of casual encounters with women of all sorts,
although he does ultimately settle down to marriage and domestic
bliss. Literary critics have found a great deal to say about the
relationships between these more celebrated novels and Fanny
Hill; Malcolm Bradbury, for example, discusses this issue in a
general sense in “Fanny Hill and the Comic Novel.”
More specific comparisons are provided by Ann Louise Kibbie in
Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure and by Edward W. Copeland in Clarissa and Fanny Hill:
Sisters in Distress.

Novels like Pamela, Clarissa, and Tom Jones
appealed to an increasingly literate public because they adopted
lower- and middle-class characters as their protagonists, and they
advanced the moral, political, and social ideals that were coming to
dominate English popular culture. Like Pamela and Tom Jones,
Fanny Hill begins with neither wealth nor social status and
eventually, through good luck, common sense and basic goodness of
heart, acquires both. This kind of plot became a standard of English
comic fiction; we see it repeated in other popular novels of the
period like Frances Burney’s Evelina and in later works
like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Lower- and
middle-class readers were inspired by these tales of success; they
wanted to believe that they, too, could move up the social ladder and
find personal happiness in spite of the apparent obstacles. Fanny is
an extreme example of this kind of success; she climbs the ladder
farther than many of her fellow protagonists because she starts out so
much lower. Orphaned and penniless at the opening of her tale, she
hopes only to become a servant in London, which would be a step up for
a poor country girl like herself. Instead, she falls down the ladder
by becoming a prostitute in Mrs. Brown’s brothel; she is, quite
literally, a “fallen” woman. According to the popular
attitudes of the time, Fanny is thus at the very bottom of the social
ladder, which makes her ultimate position as a wealthy middle-class
matron all the more remarkable. If a girl like Fanny could make it,
then her eighteenth-century readers might hope to do so, too.

The novels of Richardson and Fielding also appealed to readers because
they combined their claims to serious moral instruction with generous
amounts of titillation, although the authors generally avoided
explicit descriptions of sexual exchanges between their characters.
While Cleland’s descriptive passages are certainly both explicit
and extensive, Fanny Hill also features a purportedly moral
objective; in the concluding paragraphs of the novel, Fanny professes
herself to be devoted to “VIRTUE” and excuses the
sensuality of her story by saying, “If I have painted vice in
all its gayest colours, if I have decked it with flowers, it has been
solely in order to make the worthier, the solemner, sacrifice of it to
virtue.” Fanny’s evocation of “virtue” here
and throughout the novel is a pointed reference to Richardson’s
Pamela, which was subtitled Virtue Rewarded, and which
came under attack from critics because it seemed to imply that servant
girls could induce their masters to marry them if they only played
hard to get. This idea is directly invoked by Cleland when, early in
the novel, one of Fanny’s friends tells her “how several
maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kin
forever, that by preserving their VIRTUE, some had taken so with their
masters that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived
vastly grand, and happy, and some, mayhap, came to be
duchesses.” Since playing hard to get is not a game to
Fanny’s taste, Cleland’s novel operates as a parody of
Richardson’s story, with Fanny’s equally successful ending
flying in the face of Richardson’s warning to young women to
preserve their virginity at all costs if they want to be happy.
Cleland was by no means the only writer to take issue with
Richardson’s view of virtue. Parodying Pamela was such a
popular employment at this time that a whole group of novels, known as
“anti-Pamelas,” appeared for public consumption, including
Henry Fielding’s Shamela, which was successful enough to
spawn its own sequel, Joseph Andrews.

Fanny, however, is temperamentally more similar to Fielding’s
Tom Jones than she is to Pamela, and this may be one reason why
Fanny Hill was officially banned while other novels were not. In
the eighteenth century, men’s sexual impulses were considered
perfectly natural, and their indiscretions were winked at or accepted;
gentlemen might keep their mistresses and acknowledge their
illegitimate offspring without concern for their reputations. Tom
Jones, himself illegitimate, can move from one lover to another
without really damaging his credibility as a sympathetic character or
his chance at a good marriage. Women, however, were strongly
encouraged to remain virgins until marriage, and they faced serious
consequences if they strayed and were discovered. In real life, women
could and often did manage a good degree of sexual liberty without
repercussions, but novels of the period tended to enforce a higher
standard of conduct and a stricter sense of poetic justice. Most of
the respectable women in eighteenth-century novels seem to have no
sexual desires whatever; they accept sex only as an obligation to
their husbands. Fictional women who allow themselves to be seduced or
even raped, like Clarissa, almost always die as a result. We see some
of this double standard at work in the Fanny Hill;
Fanny’s keeper, Mr. H-, thinks nothing of seducing Fanny’s
maid, but he immediately ends his relationship with Fanny when she
retaliates by taking another lover herself. For the most part,
however, Fanny’s story opposes the double standard by showing a
woman’s comic sexual adventures. Fanny is not merely an object
of desire, but also the owner of desire, and she acts upon her urges
with the casual abandon usually reserved for men. Her brief interlude
with the sailor after a frustrating meeting with her impotent keeper
serves as a particularly striking example of Fanny’s cavalier
attitude toward sex.

Fanny’s libertine notions about sex do, however, have their
limits, thus reflecting some of the deeply held sexual attitudes of
her time. Fanny is initially taken aback by the sight of a couple in
the nude; her reaction might strike modern readers as comically
naïve, but most English people at that time thought that shifts
and shirts were necessary for both modesty and good health. Being
naked was, therefore, particularly exotic and daring, and Fanny and
the other women typically remain at least partially clothed during
their encounters. More significantly, Fanny is later shocked and
disgusted by the spectacle of homosexual intercourse, and both she and
other characters in the novel condemn homosexuality as perverse. After
all of the other episodes that Fanny reports with either pleasure or
acceptance, especially the lesbian interludes with Phoebe and the
“country dance” at Mrs. Cole’s house, her strong
negative reaction to homosexuality might seem surprising, but sodomy
was a serious criminal act in eighteenth-century England, and
homosexuals were frequently singled out for public censure. The
importance of this scene in relation to the rest of the novel and to
eighteenth-century culture has been argued at length by a number of
scholars, including Peter Sabor in From Sexual Liberation to Gender
Trouble: Reading Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from the 1960s
to the 1990s.

The modern reader may or may not share Fanny’s reactions to some
of the acts described in Fanny Hill, but he or she is almost
certain to be struck by the language that Cleland employs for those
descriptions. Given the fact that Cleland never uses any profanity or
coarse language in the novel, even in the most explicit passages,
readers today might consider Fanny Hill to be pretty tame. We
are, after all, accustomed to the graphic images and four letter words
that have spilled out into our mainstream media over the last decade
or so, and modern pornography must cross ever-broadening boundaries to
retain its shock value. Some might even find the novel to be
unintentionally comic because of its euphemisms and metaphors, but
Cleland’s theme in the novel is pleasure, not crudity, and his
work is meant to be erotic rather than strictly pornographic. Cleland
associates pleasure with beauty, grace, and youth, and his language
attempts to describe sexual pleasure in graceful terms; both he and
his characters abhor the vulgar language that degrades the sexual act
and those who enjoy it. Indeed, Cleland was himself aware of the
difficulty his readers might have with the novel’s descriptive
language; he has Fanny remark on this very problem to the recipient of
her account. Fanny laments the “extreme difficulty of continuing
so long in one strain, in a mean tempered with taste, between the
revoltingness of gross, rank, and vulgar expressions, and the ridicule
of mincing metaphors and affected circumlocutions.” If Cleland
fails to achieve this perfect balance, at least he attempts it, and
his polite descriptions may at least offer the modern reader a respite
from our own era’s cruder versions of eroticism.

Fanny Hill is, ultimately, a book that many might call a guilty
pleasure, but it offers more than mere titillation and amusement. We
can see in Cleland’s novel many of the same themes and ideals of
the era’s greatest works, and we are allowed an unusual glimpse
of the most private aspects of eighteenth-century life. We are
fortunate that we, as modern readers, have the opportunity to enjoy
this important and engaging text, which more than two centuries of
scandal and censorship could not repress.

Jennifer C. Garlen received her doctoral degree from Auburn
University and teaches English at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville. She specializes in the study of the British novel in the
eighteenth century.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I bought this on a whim and wasn't sure if I'd like it - Turns out I LOVE this book! I highly recommend the Fanny Hill book to anyone looking for a bit of excitement and erotica in a book.
You'll enjoy every page as I did.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

It is one of those that you have to take your time reading. This book was banned for a while for obvious reasons. It is very interesting with a great ending. Good interesting details.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Pure erotica without all the filthy language of today. Cleland wrote this in 1749 so the writing is a bit stilted until you get immersed in the second or third page. After that, it is a romp through England's seedier side when you're a woman left alone and penniless and naive to the ways of the world. Madame X was a marvel.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

I always wondered what this book was about and why it was such a hushed book in its time. It is quite interesting to read the ideas and value system of this era. It is a good book for those who might think that woman were not less than second class chattel in the last 100 plus years. Reading this book just puts perspective onto a young woman's sexual situation and lack of freedom. For that reason alone it'sworth the time to read.